Wireless Sensor Networks in the Context of Zambia: A Developing Country

Recent advances in wireless communications have motivated the development of extremely small, low-cost sensors that possess sensing, signal processing, and wireless communication. A wireless network consisting of a large number of small sensors (called wireless sensor network, WSN) with low power transceivers can be an effective tool for gathering data in a variety of environments. The data collected by each sensor is delivered (or forwarded) through the network to a single processing center (so-called sink) that uses all reported data to determine characteristics of the environment or detect an event. This paper discusses in general the concept of wireless sensor networks and some of the design challenges, and then identifies specific application domains and investigates their scope and usefulness in the context of Zambia which is a developing country.